Wisconsin native, conservative critic of everything.
"Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God." ---G K Chesterton
"The only objective of Liberty is Life" --G K Chesterton
"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions" --G K Chesterton
"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition." -- Rudyard Kipling

Wednesday, June 02, 2010

Why Tommy Thompson Bailed Out : Amtrak Extends Its Middle Finger

Tommy Thompson was a Big Spending/Big Government kinda guy. (It's a helluvalot easier to make friends that way, you know....)

He saddled SE Wisconsin with a tax to pay for Bud Selig's new playground, which allowed Bud (and his far-more-wealthy pals/co-investors) to sell the Brewers for a tidy gain. He proposed enough 'highway improvements' to pave over Rhode Island. He increased State Government employment by about FIFTY PERCENT during his regime.

Tommy "Stick-It-To-'Em" also loved choochoo trains, and sat on the Amtrak Board until he became HHS Secretary. That particular timeframe is important, because the stink of Amtrak is only beginning to spread.

We already knew that they Amtrak loses money on nearly every route, and that many of their trains are more expensive to run than it would be to buy plane tickets for all of the passengers.

Oh--there's more!! And it's even uglier:

A previously undisclosed seven-year investigation later uncovered serious accounting shenanigans inside Amtrak that kept federal officials, Congress and the public in the dark about the national rail service’s true finances, according to documents obtained by The Washington Times through the Freedom of Information Act….

What authorities ultimately unraveled was that two former Amtrak officials, in fiscal 2001, either booked false or incorrect accounting entries in Amtrak’s monthly financial statements or else failed to report the activities

Now the REAL sewage-flow:

Amtrak paid $150,000 in legal fees for two of the (still unnamed) employees involved in cooking the books, even though the investigation showed that “neither individual acted in good faith.”

It would be inaccurate and unfair to blame only Tommy Thompson for this crap.

But it IS crap. Thompson was a Member of the Board. Trains are losers.

3 comments:

More conservative ideology and it's the usual unthinking crap. EVERY form of public transportation is subsidized, from the airlines to sidewalks. Government builds and operates the airports, while Amtrak owns and maintains many of the stations it uses. Government provides the air traffic control system for the airlines. Amtrak has to pay the freight railroads to use their track and obey their dispatchers.